


Fears to be Faced

by WorryinglyInnocent



Series: Homeward Bound [6]
Category: Lost
Genre: AU, Canon Divergence, Fix-it fic, Gen, Oceanic Six Claire, season 4, season 5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-04
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-27 01:42:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13870395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WorryinglyInnocent/pseuds/WorryinglyInnocent
Summary: Continuing theHomeward Boundseries, a canon divergence in which Claire left the island in the season four finale and became part of the Oceanic Six, raising Aaron herself.After the visit from Locke, Claire receives a phone call that will change her life forever, and she and her mother make the nerve-wracking flight to LA to confront the truth of her parentage.





	Fears to be Faced

It’s not too long after Locke’s visit that Claire gets the call that will change everything. They’ve just celebrated Aaron’s third birthday, and although Locke’s words are still there at the back of her mind, she’s not paid them that much mind. Although a part of her will always be lost to that island, she really has no desire to go back and try to find it.

It’s a perfectly ordinary day. Her mum is over and they’re having tea on the patio whilst Aaron plays outside. The cordless phone chirrups into life and Claire thinks nothing of it, until the voice on the other end speaks, sounding distinctly American.

_“Hello, am I speaking to Ms Claire Littleton?”_

“Yes.”

_“Hello Ms Littleton, I’m calling from Norton and Partners Law in Los Angeles, is this a convenient time?”_

Claire raises an eyebrow as she replies. “Sure. What’s happening?”

_“We’re calling you about the will of Mr Christian Shepherd.”_

Claire’s brow furrows. “Christian Shepherd? I don’t know a Christian Shepherd. Are you sure you don’t mean Jack?” Not that she really thinks that anyone would be calling her about Jack’s will, because she likes to think that she’d know if he was dead. Or at least, she’d know that he was dead before they got to the will-reading stage. Kate would have told her as soon as whatever happened, happened. So Claire doesn’t know what’s going on or who this man is, or why this lawyer is calling her.

_“No, Jack Shepherd is his son, I’m sorry for the confusion.”_

Claire gets a sinking feeling in her stomach. Jack’s father died in Australia. His coffin was on their plane. Jack was escorting him home ready to bury him. But the funeral was years ago, why are they only just getting around to the will reading, and why are his lawyers calling Claire of all people?

Why was Christian Shepherd in Australia in the first place?

Claire realises that she already knows the answer, as much as she really doesn’t want to admit it. She remembers her father turning up on Aunt Lindsay’s doorstep a couple of days before Claire ended up flying out to LA. She can see, out of the corner of her eye, the way that her mother’s face has gone pale and drawn at the mention of Christian’s name.

_“Ms Littleton, would you be able to travel to our office in Los Angeles? This is a complicated legal situation and we would ideally like to be able to deal with all parties in person.”_

“No,” Claire says shortly. “No I…” She can’t make that trip, not after what happened last time. For a wild moment, she wonders if this is all a trick, if it’s something that Locke has cooked up to get her to go back to the island. But then she catches her mother’s eye again and she falters.

“Can I call you back?”

 _“Of course.”_ The lawyer gives her the number. _“We’re open for the next three hours and then Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm Pacific Standard Time, I believe we’re nineteen hours behind you.”_

“Thanks.”

She hangs up and looks over at her mother.

“Is there something I need to know?” she asks.

Carole nods slowly. “Christian Shepherd was your father,” she says.

Although Claire had already come to the same conclusion herself, it’s still something else entirely to have it confirmed. Strangely enough, the first thing that she feels isn’t anger at either of her parents or at the circumstances that led to where they are now, but disbelieving shock.

“Jack’s my half-brother.”

“Yes, he is.”

“All that time and I never knew we were related. And I guess he didn’t, either.”

“I doubt it.” Carole’s voice is sour; Claire doesn’t know the details of her relationship with her father, all she knows is the snippets that Carole has told her over the years, that he was around, but then he left for good when she was two, going back to his other family in America and only turning up again when it was too late, when Claire was already too angry at his absence to want to get to know him. The shadowy figure in her life, the one that she had glimpsed on the island. She had only ever known him as her father, had never associated a name to him. But now he has a name, and now that other family has a name, and it’s a name she knows.

“Claire?”

She pulls herself out of her train of thought and looks over at her mother.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” she said. “I know before you never wanted to have anything to do with him, and believe me, I can understand that. I didn’t want anything else to do with him either after what he did. But I should have told you after you came back from the island. Once you’d met Jack. But then you’d been through so much upheaval already and I didn’t want to add to it. It was one of those things that didn’t seem as important as everything else that was going on at the time, and you knowing wouldn’t have changed anything.”

Claire nods; she’s not mad at her mother for keeping this from her. She’s not really mad at anyone, except the residual anger that she has always held towards the absent father figure in her life.

“I don’t want his money,” she says firmly. “It’s not like I need it.”

“No,” Carole agrees. “But I think that perhaps you need the closure.”

Her mother has a point. Now that the connection between them has been disclosed, Claire really wants to see Jack again. Family she never knew she had. She’s happy as she is, with just Carole and Aaron and Aunt Lindsay as her family, but the fact that she spent so much time with Jack without knowing they were related, well, it warrants a conversation at least. No doubt he has just as many questions as she does.

“I can’t take that flight again,” Claire says. She’s taken flights since the crash, she’s been to South Korea a couple of times now, but that single particular route still fills her with fear.

“I’ll come with you,” Carole says. It’s such a simple thing. “I get the feeling that my version of events might clear up any legal nastiness that might arise. That’s not something that I would want you to face alone even if you didn’t have to fly across an ocean to do it.”

“What about Aaron?”

“We’ll bring him too.”

There are a thousand what-ifs spiralling through Claire’s mind. What if there’s another crash? What if they end up back on the island? What if this is all a hoax by Locke? Surely they wouldn’t have taken this long to find and go through Christian’s will? Part of her wants to call Jack to make sure that this is all real, but then, if it isn’t, wouldn’t that just open up a whole new can of worms?

She rests her head in her hands.

“Would you like me to handle it?” Carole asks gently. Claire shakes her head. She’s an adult, and she can do this. She can take care of herself, she can face her fears and she can get through whatever comes next.

The internet tells her that Norton and Partners Law is a genuine and respected firm, and the phone numbers match up.

She calls them and tells them that she and Carole will be there in a week.

X

Claire wants to be anywhere in the world except in this airport. She tries every yoga breathing trick she’s ever learned, but it doesn’t help, and by the time they’ve got through check in and security and are into the departure lounge, she’s just about ready to faint. Any other route. Any other airline. But Sydney to Los Angeles on an Oceanic flight just seems fated. She shouldn’t be doing this, she shouldn’t have come, and she definitely shouldn’t be bringing Aaron and her mother with her.

“Claire, sweetheart.” Her mother’s touch on her arm is gentle and reassuring, and Claire knows that Carole can see the wild panic in her eyes.

“Breathe,” her mother says, taking both Claire’s hands in hers. “Just breathe, my love. You’re going to be all right. We all are.”

Claire shakes her head as she feels bile rise in the back of her throat and she runs for the ladies’ bathroom. She hasn’t been this violently sick since the first trimester of her pregnancy when she lived off apple juice and crackers for a week. It’s not even as if there’s anything to come up; she was too anxious to eat breakfast. Or lunch.

“Are you ok, honey?” An American woman taps on the cubicle door as she dry-heaves again, and she sounds so much like Rose that for a moment Claire has déjà vu and she wonders if she’s somehow warped through space and time and she’s back three years ago, heavily pregnant and about to embark on a journey into the unknown.

It’s not Rose. Of course it’s not Rose. They left Rose on the island.

“Just a nervous flyer,” she says. “I’m ok, thanks.”

Once the nausea finally passes, Claire emerges to find Carole and Aaron sitting on a bench outside the bathrooms.

“Mummy’s just scared,” Carole is explaining to Aaron. “She doesn’t like flying. That’s why she’s sick. She’ll be fine as soon as we get there. You’ll have to be very brave for her. Can you do that for Mummy and Grandma?”

Aaron nods, and scrambles onto Claire’s lap as she sits down with them.

“It’s ok, Mummy. I’m not scared.”

Aaron’s actually incredibly excited about his first plane ride (well, not the first, but the first he can remember, and Claire doesn’t want to go into the complexities of helicopters and island escapes and charter planes to Hawaii), but he’s doing a good job of sitting quietly and not running off to look at the planes or the luggage carts or any of the other myriad things in the airport that are so very interesting for a three year old. Claire’s glad that her fear has not passed on to him, and eventually she gets her mother to take him off to explore and satisfy his curiosity, whilst she sits and sips apple juice and watches from afar. Her Gold Pass has already caused a few glances and whispers among the Oceanic staff at the gate, and she’s sure that she could get the VIP treatment if she wanted it, but for now she’s happy to just sit in obscurity and pray that no-one recognises her as one of the Oceanic Six making the same flight she made three years ago.

Finally the flight is called, and Claire gathers the strands of her panic together as she moves towards the gate. Aaron squeezes her hand in his excitement, and Claire thinks that if she can survive this, she can survive anything.

X

The meeting at the lawyer’s office is tense, but it is not as strained as Claire thought it might be. Perhaps it’s just because she’s so relieved that her flight landed without incident that everything that comes after seems to be a breeze in comparison. She had expected there to be animosity between her mother and Jack’s, the two women in this one man’s life, but instead there is only sadness and sympathy, a kind of melancholy bond over the fact that neither of them really knew him until it was too late and the damage had already been done. Margot is not cold towards Claire, the living proof of her husband’s philandering; after all, they met before in Hawaii when the Oceanic Six were brought back to civilisation, but there’s something in her eyes when she looks at her and Aaron that Claire can’t quite place. It’s not resentment, but it’s not fully welcoming either. Perhaps she’s still coming to terms with the fact that after three years of wrestling with wills and probate, it all comes down to a confirmation of something she’s suspected for a long time, that her husband for at least part of their marriage was leading a double life.

Jack is the one that it seems to have affected the most, and he stays quiet for the majority of the meeting, as if he’s still getting his head around the fact that Claire is his half-sister, this young woman whom he met for the first time in the aftermath of a plane crash and with whom he has gone through so much life and loss is actually related to him. Aaron is his nephew when he always thought that he had been an only child.

Christian left a modest sum to Claire in his will, but she shakes her head.

“I don’t want it,” she says. “I never really knew him as a father. I never knew his name until a week ago. I’ve never had any connection with him and I can’t in good faith accept this.”

Nothing anyone says will sway her from this course. There is more that she wants to say and shout and scream, but she can’t do it in front of Jack and his mother. She doesn’t want Christian’s guilt money, not after he walked out of her life when he was two and only turned up again in the middle of what had been the worst personal crisis of her life to that point. So he paid her mother’s medical bills whilst she was in the hospital, but that’s the extent of her gratitude towards him.

Nevertheless, she keeps her mouth closed, refuses the legacy and signs it over to Jack. He can do whatever the hell he likes with it, but Claire wants nothing to do with Christian Shepherd.

She doesn’t think that she’s entirely surprised when she leaves the meeting room and finds Jack swallowing pills outside. He looks done in, but he smiles when he sees her, outside of the suffocating confines of the lawyer’s office.

“It’s good to see you and Aaron again, Claire,” he says, and Claire knows that he means it, whatever state that he might be in. “So, what are you doing now?”

Claire shrugs. “Back on a plane and back home, I guess. I don’t really have anything else to stick around in LA for.”

“Are you sure? I mean, I know that Kate and Hurley would both love to see you. I think it might do Hurley good to see you, actually.”

Claire doesn’t want to stay in California any longer than she has to, but the thought of seeing Hurley and Kate again after so long really is a persuasive one.

“Sun’s here too,” Jack adds. “She’s on a stopover, Kate’s going to see her.”

Claire wonders what the relationship between Kate and Jack is now. The last she heard, things had been rather acrimonious, but if they’re talking then that’s probably a good sign.

“Maybe it’s fate, all of us being here at the same time,” Jack continues. Claire looks at him steadily, wondering if he’ll follow that up with something philosophical about them all going back to the island. He doesn’t.

She’s just about to walk away when Jack calls her back.

“Claire, did Locke visit you?”

She nods. “About a month ago.”

“I don’t suppose you got the news in Australia… He died.”

The revelation hits her like a shock of ice water, although she doesn’t know why it affects her so badly. She thinks of his insistence that they had to go back to the island. She thinks of Hurley’s fears of the same.

Maybe it would be a good idea to see everyone again, now that she’s here and they’ve all been brought together in this place.

 

 


End file.
